A Week of Searching for Texas Flood Victims
Hundreds of rescuers from across the country gathered in Central Texas over the last week to search for flash flooding victims. At least 121 people were killed, and more than 170 remain missing.
Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Teams scoured fields along a floodplain in Center Point, Texas, using a technique called a hasty line search, where they scan the ground just feet apart.
When items were found, they were documented and sent to officials for families to identify.
Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Heavy machinery was brought in to clear densely packed piles of debris.
Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Hazardous areas were marked with tape. Many sites also had large orange X marks spray-painted on homes, sheds, R.V.s and debris piles, marking places where rescuers had searched for survivors.
Desiree Rios for The New York Times
In Ingram, Texas, divers scanned the bottom of the Guadalupe River and a nearby dam. They moved slowly because the dark water and low visibility obscured many sharp objects and submerged vehicles.
Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times
By Friday, some of the first search teams were leaving the area, replaced by new workers. Experts in search and recovery said they expected the process to last more than a year.
Desiree Rios for The New York Times
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Fast Company
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Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. As I understand it, Watch Duty is a nonprofit and it's an app that gathers information largely from volunteers, right? From regular people who are monitoring fires? It's like a community? Very much so. You can look at Reddit and Wikipedia in a similar way. The difference is, we do it live. We have about 200 volunteers, about 20 paid staff, about 10 of those are radio operators themselves. But the information really comes from fire service radio. So after going through a couple of disasters, you realize that there's not a Starlink in every truck. The communication systems aren't very good. The firefighters are in danger, and the only way to hear what's actually going on is through them collaborating with each other in real time, through the radio. And so we hear: 'Fire starting here, burning over this ridge.' 'Tankers and dozers are coming.' 'Holding the line to Highway 87.' 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One of the fires I went through, which was one of the big ones in 2020, when the sky turned red up in Northern California, I was watching them on Facebook and Twitter already doing this. So they were kind of regionalized. There was someone in Red Bluff, someone in Redding, someone in SoCal, someone in Sonoma, Napa. They were independently doing this. They knew each other. They would talk and collaborate a little bit, but they wouldn't organize together. They weren't adversarial, they just didn't spend time really collaborating. The innovation was really [to] convince them all to work together—that I was not [just] a techie. That I lived here, like them, in the same danger that they did. The key was to convince them that I'm here to help. I'm part of this community. I'm not sitting in my laboratory in Silicon Valley trying to profiteer off of your disaster. And the information that they're sharing, the app puts it into a more usable form or a more accessible form? 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So of the folks who are on duty or running the event at that time, some of them may be volunteers and some of them may be your staff people? advertisement Yeah, it's a mixed bag. Like many nonprofits, there's paid staff and then there's volunteers. And a lot of our volunteers are now either changing careers or having a second career, because first, they contribute and they listen, and then they start to report, and then they become a staff reporter or a regional captain in the area and help run and collaborate certain parts of a state or a region. And then many of them actually become full-time employees. During the fires I saw that Watch Duty passed ChatGPT as the No. 1 downloaded app. The traffic must have really caught you by surprise, just like the fire did. Yeah, it did. Here's the sad part: We've been the No. 1 app in the App Store three times. This time was the worst, by far. Yeah, I mean, L.A.'s own emergency alert system, there was one, but it was buggy. 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DaRon Holmes II rocks the rim
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